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[Leyic]

Some things I found in the FAQ on the backer forum:

Belief does accumulate when you're not playing, even if the game isn't running. The balance is a bit off and there are a few bugs which means that there are conflicts and the system is not running quite as expected. The whole process is much quicker in battle mode. For the homeworld, we want it to have a bonsai garden zen feel where you shaping your land over time, pruning here, encouraging there.

One does not know what the final game will be like as at this stage everything can be changed, but one can say that in the Alpha higher elevations make your followers happier as does building size. How happy your followers are makes a difference as to how quickly belief is accumulated.

The current build forces you to do a lot of clicking and sculpting because we want to improve the low level sculpting and get tons of analytics on it. More powerful sculpting abilities will be coming later on when we feel we have enough data on the initial sculpting powers.

Making you collect belief for each and every house is, as usual, an experiment. You are our guinea pigs. We'll probably have a less tedious system in place in the future. You'll still always be collecting belief yourself but you'll probably be able to collect a lot more of it with a lot less clicking. More info on this when we've talked it through internally.

I'm not sure there's anything to "win" in home world. In battles you'll be playing against other players so the difficulty to be relative to your opponents skill. If everything goes according to plan and the match making works you'll be playing against someone of equal skill so each battle should be a 50/50 chance of winning. Roughly speaking, anyway.

(emphasis mine)

So what we have now is more like a toy that's not meant to be played actively, while the game aspect will come from multiplayer battles, which aren't in the beta yet aside from the pushover AI. Anything that's tedious is because they're still collecting data or thinking of alternate systems. So, I guess this beta is more like an alpha, and hopefully the "40% complete" statement is an overestimation.

The zen garden homeworld idea with instanced battles wouldn't be so bad if aesthetics didn't get in the way of progress. As it is, you pretty much have to flatten everything just to have enough population to go to the next age. If bulldozing structures were easier, you can do more with less land, but even that is ridiculously tedious. The battles themselves are another matter, though.

[burningpet]

Some things I found in the FAQ on the backer forum:

Belief does accumulate when you're not playing, even if the game isn't running. The balance is a bit off and there are a few bugs which means that there are conflicts and the system is not running quite as expected. The whole process is much quicker in battle mode. For the homeworld, we want it to have a bonsai garden zen feel where you shaping your land over time, pruning here, encouraging there.

One does not know what the final game will be like as at this stage everything can be changed, but one can say that in the Alpha higher elevations make your followers happier as does building size. How happy your followers are makes a difference as to how quickly belief is accumulated.

The current build forces you to do a lot of clicking and sculpting because we want to improve the low level sculpting and get tons of analytics on it. More powerful sculpting abilities will be coming later on when we feel we have enough data on the initial sculpting powers.

Making you collect belief for each and every house is, as usual, an experiment. You are our guinea pigs. We'll probably have a less tedious system in place in the future. You'll still always be collecting belief yourself but you'll probably be able to collect a lot more of it with a lot less clicking. More info on this when we've talked it through internally.

I'm not sure there's anything to "win" in home world. In battles you'll be playing against other players so the difficulty to be relative to your opponents skill. If everything goes according to plan and the match making works you'll be playing against someone of equal skill so each battle should be a 50/50 chance of winning. Roughly speaking, anyway.

(emphasis mine)

Wot? honestly, if i was a backer in this kickstarter, i'd be tad offended.

[Aklyon]

This sounds more like that Virtual Villagers game, but with more direct controls.

[Leyic]

The villagers in Virtual Villagers would actually do things while you were away, so there'd usually be something new to do when you came back to the game: either the village developed some new ability for you to mess with, or there was some crisis you'd need to resolve. In Godus (so far), the villagers just sit in their homes generating faith, so you'll always come back to the same situation: A bunch of orbs you have to click on to play the "game".

Anyhow, for anyone who's playing this, you can press F8 to access a debug landscaping tool. Despite the obvious cheaty-ness of using it, you can flatten land for houses or to dig for treasure without having to wait ludicrously long times to regen faith (~40 minutes for cabins at the third elevation!). You can even put down new trees and rocks to make the landscape less of a blight of houses.

[BuriBuriZaemon]

After watching TotalBiscuit's video on this, I came to learn that this is just a Facebook-style game with Molyneux's hype sprinkled all over it. Designing a tablePC game and promoting it as a 'successor to Populous' is really offensive to PC gaming community.

[nenjin]

Apparently the bots in the chat room are really fucking creepy. Like, pedo creepy. Bots. In a chat room. While playing Populous. I feel dirty writing that whole sentence.

This game is pretty much dead to me. Between that, the multiplayer "battles", and the Farmville-style collection method it seems like this is going way off track from what I wanted or was hoping for. I hear the incessant clicking is ameliorated later on with some type of civic structure that collects nearby belief.....but that's a pretty thin pretext. The game has basically been imagined as a Facebook game to be played mindlessly for minutes at a time, and more seriously? later. At only half done there's lots of things it could do to get me interested again....but the game is coming to represent everything I loathe about the mobile/social networking obsession.

[alway]

So by the sounds of it, in this game, you play as Peter Molyneux.

To wit:
You go around, gathering enough belief, and when you get enough, you can make something flat and featureless.

[woosholay]

^ sig worthy

[Neonivek]

the game is coming to represent everything I loathe about the mobile/social networking obsession

You are late to the game. I've already watched a game I like sunk by "Social features" about a year ago.

In fact EA, before the CEO was thankfully let go, was going to insert "Social features" into ALL their games.

[10ebbor10]

After watching TotalBiscuit's video on this, I came to learn that this is just a Facebook-style game with Molyneux's hype sprinkled all over it. Designing a tablePC game and promoting it as a 'successor to Populous' is really offensive to PC gaming community.

Well, it has about the same gameplay features as his previous game.

Lot's of clicking, and competitive clicking.

[ragnar119]

If they do not change the direction where this game is going, as their core game mechanics are really more designed for a tablet type of play (the worst thing is how it seem tablet and pc version will be 100% same, except the interface and controls) they will not get good reception when it comes to PC.

[SharpKris]

I for one, dont understand how the backers for this are not furious.

[Neyvn]

I, for one, will say this...
I am still hopeful...

[Catastrophic lolcats]

Well judging by the steam community forums for the game people are indeed quite annoyed. Things were really heated before Molyneux reverted due to customer backlash announced there was never any plans to charge for gems. There are also a couple of posts stating that a lot of the cynical threads are being deleted but that is so far unconfirmed.

[Virtz]

Maybe it's because of how the wording suggests it may change a lot. And 60% is a lot of possible change.

Plus it feels like it wouldn't be hard for them to get rid of the farmville features and basically bring it closer to being Black & White X Populous (which it already almost is, really). Just a question of whether or not they'll want to do it.